I guess if you’ve been keeping up in any capacity, you know that I recently had a little operation done. By “little operation”, of course, I am referring to the quintuple bypass that I underwent on June 16th of 2016. Yes, quintuple. 5 arteries in my heart replaced. I figure if you’re going to have your first major surgery, there is no reason to half-ass it, right?

You don’t go through an experience like that as a writer without writing about it. Which brings me to my current dilemma/journey/endeavor/challenge: what exactly to write.

You see, the entire time I was in the hospital, I was taking notes and writing drafts here in the back end of this website, knowing that one day I was going to throw it all together and tell the story of my resurrection, as I so lovingly call it. I literally have thousands of words just sitting, waiting to be organized into something resembling a coherent story.

On one hand, that’s awesome because I have tons of material to pull from. On the other hand, you have to consider that for a large portion of the time I was taking said notes and writing said drafts – I was under the influence of an opioid cocktail that I referred to as the “pain train” (I literally said “choo-choo” every time I’d take it). Nothing says “hey, want to see how far your mind can wander off of the beaten path?” like a bi-hourly dose of morphine stacked with OxyContin’s ugly cousin, Norco.

Essentially, what I am left with is a the verbal equivalent of a Lego set that has 6 times as many Legos as I need to complete what it is that I am trying to build, and some of those Legos aren’t even Legos – they are that off-brand “dyna blocks” shit that kind of looks like a Lego but isn’t.

Oh yeah, and the plans are written backwards. In Chinese. By a drunk man with a crayon. On Wax paper.

I guess the logical place to start is right here. Where it all started (hence the Full Circles). This website was started shortly after my 30th birthday as part of my dedication to change my life. Diet, exercise, lifestyle, and all of the other adjustments I was making became the topics of conversation. Nothing like being your own support group, right?

It was about a year into that transformation that the proverbial drain plug got pulled without me even knowing it.

I went from maintaining that healthy lifestyle that I’d laid out, to 7 months later not being able to walk from my bed to my bathroom without being completely out of breath. I ignored, avoided, and dodged every indication that something was wrong with me right up until I was laying in an ambulance and the EMT said, “Well, Mr. Gammill, the good news is that you haven’t had a heart attack. The bad news is that we can’t figure out why not.”

That night in 2013 began the 3 year drain-circling, mental, emotional, financial, personal, train wreck that became my life. The drain-circling, mental, emotional, financial, personal, train wreck that has lead to me writing the story of my recovery here in the very place that the whole journey started to begin with.